Device manufacturers commonly sell products into different markets or at different price points, though the products' hardware devices may have similar bills of material and/or manufacturing costs. One way in which the device manufacturer can differentiate hardware devices is by the capabilities each device offers. For example, a hardware device having fewer capabilities may sell for a lower price than the same hardware device with additional or more sophisticated capabilities. These capabilities can be enabled by one or more licenses that are stored locally on the hardware device. Traditionally, licensed rights have been defined on a host and licensed software has been tied to a particular hardware device identity, thereby limiting a user's ability to upgrade capabilities or substitute one hardware device for another.
As described by U.S. Pat. No. 8,103,804, a device manufacturer may elect to implement an embedded regenerative licensing system if license requests are to be served by a single license server. That is, a regenerative licensing system can accurately update and maintain one or more licenses only if a hardware device transmits license requests to, and receives responses from, a single licensing source, e.g. server. Problems arise when two or more licensing sources, e.g. multiple licensing servers, are necessary to respond to license requests transmitted by a hardware device.